Keeping Track of Connections

Rather than focusing on providing a large amount of functionalities, this interface makes it easier for teachers to reach all parents by keeping track of their communication capabilities and limitations. After logging into her account, Tammy is taken to her home screen, where all of her contacts are organized with icons representing each of her students and their profiles.

Description: The primary purpose of this interface is to keep track of contact information and allow for communication across platforms. This contact display helps Tammy to track and manage the contact information of all of her students' families, which can be challenging with so many contacts and contact information that may change on a frequent basis.

Initiating Contact

Action: Since she makes the most regular contact with students and not their parents, the display uses photo thumbnails of each student to help Tammy easily recall which correspondences need to be made. After identifying Sarah's picture, Tammy can overlay her mouse on in which causes a menu for the type of contact that needs to be made
Description: The scheduler tab can be used to can designate her availabilities by clicking and dragging on the gridded calendar. To initialize a new available time slot, she clicks on the start time, drags to the end time and then releases. When the mouse is released, the corresponding cells in the grid are shaded in. Each selection is interval-sticky to the hour granularity. She can create multiple availabilities by clicking and dragging on another available time, and she can click and drag on an already created availability to move it to somewhere else on the calendar (e.g. move it to another day). Finally, when she has a selected an availability, she can remove it by pressing the X (revealed on hover) in the upper-right corner of it to delete it.

Additionally, the columns can be paginated to days further than 7 days in advance by clicking on arrows surrounding the days of the week at the top (revealed on hover).

Communicating Across Platforms

Action: Tammy clicked "Publish" in the Scheduler tab of the publisher above and this post was generated 
Description: The post is editable directly from the stream. The editing mechanism works exactly as it does in the publisher, except changes are published with the “Save Changes” button. Whenever changes  are saved, the post is moved to the bottom of the content stream.

In the content stream, the scheduler utilizes paging so that availability can span multiple weeks. Additionally, it uses a smart layout to maximize the amount of information seen by coalescing multiple days in a row where there is no availability from either party. For instance, if neither party has scheduled availability from Wednesday to Friday, there will be a single empty column with the label “Wed-Fri”. To schedule on one of these days, clicking on the title or the column will auto expand it to all of the collapsed columns.

Whenever someone loads the stream and days have past on the scheduler, the scheduler will reflect it by gray-scaling those specific days.

There is also a legend at the top to indicate the availability of both parties. Brenda can schedule a meeting with Tammy by clicking and dragging on any section that overlaps with Tammy and clicking the “Save Changes”.

Staying Updated

Action: Brenda added an appointment through the Stream Scheduler.
Description: Tammy is notified that she should accompany her scheduled meeting with a message in the content stream. The “Add to calendar” button is a link to an .ics file